


Never Tremble Nor Flinch

by CelestialArcadia



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Actor Crowley (Good Omens), Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Hollywood, Alternate Universe - Human, Bisexual Crowley (Good Omens), Butch/Femme, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/F, Femme Crowley (Good Omens), Gay Aziraphale (Good Omens), Gay Bar, Good AUmens AU Festival, Ineffable Wives | Female Aziraphale/Female Crowley (Good Omens), Lesbian Anathema Device, Love at First Sight, Minor Anathema Device/Newton Pulsifer, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, POV Third Person Limited, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, Speakeasies, Trans Female Newton Pulsifer, Writer Aziraphale (Good Omens), butch aziraphale aka half my reason for writing this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:49:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25420408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CelestialArcadia/pseuds/CelestialArcadia
Summary: The year is 1926. Modern woman Antonia Crowley has, as one does, moved from England to America on a whim. It isn't long before she meets—and is quickly besotted by—fellow transplant Angeline Fell, patroness of the local pansy club.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 30
Collections: Good AUmens AU Fest





	Never Tremble Nor Flinch

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all. This is—hopefully—the first part of my contribution to the Good AUmens event. I can't promise that this will ever be finished, let alone on a regular schedule, but at least I can promise that this chapter exists.
> 
> 1\. The title of this fic comes from the poem “I, Lover” by Elsa Gidlow from her 1923 collection _[On a Grey Thread](https://archive.org/details/OnAGreyThread)_ , believed to be the first book of explicitly lesbian love poetry published in the US. It’s in the public domain and can be read in its entirety on the Internet Archive ([“I, Lover” is page 61](https://archive.org/details/OnAGreyThread/page/n57/mode/2up)).
> 
> 2\. Odd-numbered chapters are from Crowley’s POV, while even-numbered chapters are from Angeline’s (Aziraphale’s) POV.
> 
> 3\. This fic will—if things work out the way I hope—contain multiple chapters with explicit sexual content, which will be noted at the top of the respective chapters. (This isn’t one of them. The Explicit rating's just there because I would otherwise probably forget to change it.)
> 
> 4\. While I was planning this fic out, I flip-flopped over whether or not I wanted to portray 20th-century homophobia and sexism or whether I wanted a more fantastical "1920s trappings without the 1920s bigotry" story. Both have their place, but I eventually decided on the former for this fic, more or less. This story isn't _about_ homophobia or sexism, but those are factors in the characters' lives. (And while I promise there's a happy ending, the nature of the setting means it might not be quite the same type of happy ending you would be more likely to expect from a story set in modern times.)

Antonia Crowley was a modern woman, and nobody would take that away from her. She had her vices, she knew that, and she didn’t hide herself away when those vices became known. She drank (sometimes to excess), she danced (never particularly well), and she knew the pleasures of men and women.

Above all, she was impulsive. She did things without thinking very much about them, or sometimes without thinking about them at all, and bore the consequences of her decisions.

Immigrating across the ocean and a whole continent and starting a whole new life with no goal and no plan—that was a bit much even for her, though. But she’d spent three decades making bad decisions for no real reason and had no intention of stopping now.

So she walked down the streets of a city she was almost totally unfamiliar with, accompanied only by directions and a promise of comradery— _”It’s where people like us go to be ourselves. I think you might have fun there.”_

Crowley stopped at a crossing and looked at her surroundings. The shop sign on the storefront across from her read “Angeline’s Antiquarian & Rare Tomes.”

“Sounds like a party,” Crowley muttered to herself as she turned into the back alley.

* * *

Crowley made sure to knock correctly. Two raps, a three-second pause, then three more knocks.

There was no response, but she had been told not to expect one just yet, so she wasn’t deterred. Crowley recited the password she had been given.

This time, a small panel on the door slid open, revealing a pair of severe eyes that looked Crowley up and down. She tried not to shiver. “You’re new,” a voice behind the door said.

“Is it that obvious?”

The panel closed, and Crowley wondered for a brief moment if she’d managed to mess up somehow. But no, the door opened, and the guard moved to let Crowley in. “Not too often English girls show up here—besides Angeline, of course. Hurry in before someone sees you.”

“Does Angeline run this place?” Crowley asked, the guard closing the door behind them as she entered.

“Not…exactly,” the guard replied. “But it’s by her graciousness and generosity that we’re able to gather here. You’d do well to stay on her good side.”

“I’ll do my best,” Crowley said as she followed, leaving out the part where she was often bad at remaining on people’s good sides. This was new territory for her; nobody knew about her past, and she wasn’t about to just _tell_ people her foibles.

The guard pulled back a large curtain separating the room they were in from the main part of the club.

“Welcome to the Eastern Gate, ma’am.”

Crowley hadn’t known what to expect. It wasn’t as if she’d never attended a party before. But this wasn’t like any party she’d ever attended, nor was it like any of her old haunts back in England.

A large jazz band played up front. Across from them, much of the floor space was taken up by dancers—people dancing alone, and men dancing with women, but also men dancing with other men, and women dancing with women.

Crowley had danced with women before, but only alone, in private, accompanied by a scratchy record on the cheap phonograph she left behind in England. Never to live music, never surrounded by dozens of people who…understand, at least a little bit, the experience of being different, and being able to celebrate those differences rather than hide them.

She never thought that she’d ever encounter a place like this. Anathema and Ellie had talked about some things on the boat and train rides, but it was one thing to hear about a place like this and quite another to experience it firsthand. (She wondered if she’d see them tonight—Anathema had said she was a regular, but Ellie was shyer and didn’t always accompany her. Crowley thought she might like to thank them, for many, many reasons.)

Aside from the band and the dance floor, there was also a bar set a bit off, and that was where Crowley saw something that _definitely_ wasn’t what she expected.

There was a woman standing at the bar, observing her surroundings. This, in and of itself, would not be very unusual, if Crowley weren’t convinced that the woman was an angel in human form.

The woman at the bar was plump, with a curled blonde Eton crop, and wore an impeccably tailored cream-colored suit. She seemed an opposite of Crowley in many ways—Crowley was thin, red-haired, and preferred dark-hued dresses and skirts—but the simple fact that the two of them were in this particular club meant that they almost certainly had something very important in common.

Crowley felt as if she could simply stare forever; that she could do nothing else with her life and yet feel satisfied. She probably would have considered it humiliating if she’d had any spare thoughts left that weren’t being occupied by the woman. Then the angel apparently noticed her looking, and she _smiled_ , and Crowley was totally gone. Crowley found herself walking across the room, towards the bar, without any apparent input from her conscious mind.

Here, standing next to her, Crowley could notice things that weren’t obvious from farther away. She was a bit shorter than Crowley, which still made her taller than most of the people in the room. (Crowley tried not to think of how they would look together; she worried that she might never be roused from her thoughts otherwise.) The bow tie that seemed only brown from across the hall, Crowley could now see, was actually a delicate tartan pattern.

Crowley racked her brain for something to say to the other woman. _Well, this is America,_ she thought, _so maybe something about baseball?_ Crowley was hardly a sport expert, but she considered herself rather cosmopolitan; a flirty metaphor couldn’t be too difficult. _Hello, shortstop. You strike my home run all the way to second base_. It might need a bit of fine-tuning, but surely the base was sound.

“I haven’t seen you here before,” the blonde woman said before Crowley could embarrass herself.

Crowley tried to keep her response nonchalant; she mostly succeeded. “Probably because I just moved here.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “So you’re the Englishwoman Anathema was talking about.” The woman stuck out a hand. “Angeline Fell. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Charmed,” Crowley replied, trying not to sound too literal as she shook Angeline’s hand. “Antonia Crowley, but it seems like Anathema already warned you about me.”

“Please, Miss Crowley. I assure you, she had only nice things to say about you.” A pause. “Well, mostly nice things.”

“I suppose that’s all I can hope for,” Crowley replied, hoping her heart wouldn’t burst out of her chest because that would be a _terrible_ way to start a new life in a new country even if the rest of the night went well. “Though I think _nice_ is overselling it a bit. I’m sure Anathema and Ellie are more than happy to not have me tagging along behind them anymore.” She looked down and swept aside a speck of dust which may or may not have actually been on her dress. “Just ‘Crowley,’ by the way. No ‘Miss.’”

“Oh, of course. Not ‘Antonia’?” Crowley looked up, and instead of the judgmental expression she expected to see on Angeline’s face, she saw only curiosity.

“You wouldn’t have much attachment to your forename either if you grew up in a town with four other Angelines, I don’t think.”

Angeline hummed a bit in thought. “I suppose not.” She gave her a soft smile. “It really is very nice to meet you, Crowley. If you don’t mind me asking, how is England? It’s been several years since I’ve been able to visit.”

So they talked a bit about England, though it turned out they had little in common even on that front; Miss Fell was from London, but moved to California a few years before the Great War—there was a story behind that, Crowley could tell, but it was probably inappropriate to ask about it so soon, especially considering how cagey she seemed when talking about her early years in America.

Crowley wondered, also, when she had started caring about appropriate conversation topics. _She really must be an angel, then,_ Crowley thought.


End file.
